Tag Archives: management

David Chinsky

Prioritizing Opportunities Using Four Levels of Focus

By Dr. David Chinsky

As leaders formulate and fine tune their strategies, it is important for them to sort through and prioritize the often bewildering array of opportunities that compete for their attention. One of the biggest traps you can fall prey to is the belief that everything is “Priority One”. The problem with this is that if everything is Priority One, then nothing is Priority One.

When leaders view any opportunity as an opportunity worth pursuing, they can set up their organizations for continuous demands that cannot possibly be met. It is important to realize that not all opportunities are created equal. Some opportunities, like many shiny objects, may serve merely as distractions from what is most important for you to be focusing your scarce time and resources on.

Once you’ve established the mission, vision, and values for your organization, and have committed to a set of strategic goals, you can be proactive in selecting those opportunities that will best contribute to your success in both the short and long-term.

The Opportunity Board, a tool best utilized every ninety days, will help you organize your opportunities into four distinct levels of priority. The first step in creating the Board is to identify all of the potential opportunities you might pursue. These can be your own personal opportunities, your team’s opportunities, or organization-wide opportunities.

This list or inventory of opportunities that might be pursued over the next ninety days need not include your daily tasks or to-dos. Rather, you are looking for the bigger projects you might undertake in the next calendar quarter that move you and your organization closer to meeting one or more of your strategic goals.

Your opportunities might include achieving a specific level of sales; completing the development of a new product or service, or at least succeeding in achieving some specific level of progress toward that new product within the next ninety days; mentoring one of your direct reports; writing a new policy; etc.

Your list of opportunities often represents a mix of short and long-term projects. You are not just looking for opportunities that you can complete in ninety days. You are also looking for projects that need to be started in the next ninety days even if you need to continue working on them into successive ninety-day periods. This is important to remember so that you don’t end up only listing low-hanging fruit on your Board. There are always going to be opportunities that will take longer than ninety days to finish, and if you exclude them from your list, you will likely never start working on them.

Once you have identified your opportunities, you can begin to sort and prioritize them, and move to a clearer understanding of where to focus the efforts and limited resources of the organization.

If everything is Priority One, then nothing is Priority One. Click To Tweet

Here are the four levels of focus—or priority—represented on the Board. Each of the four concentric circles represents a different level of priority, as follows:

Bullseye

These opportunities align with one or more of the organization’s key strategies, and rise to the top of your list of opportunities you want to pursue in the next ninety days. When executed properly, these opportunities result in target markets being profitably served and/or projects yielding great benefit for internal and or external customers.

In the Ballpark

These opportunities are close enough to your “bullseye” to warrant your attention and evaluation. While not necessarily in your “sweet spot”, these opportunities deserve your serious consideration once you’ve completed opportunities in the “bullseye” of your Opportunity Board.

Opportunistic Focus

These opportunities sometimes come only once in a lifetime and may trump an opportunity in the “bullseye” or “in the ballpark” sections of your Opportunity Board. Other opportunities placed in this portion of the Board are opportunities you cannot begin before securing the funding, enabling legislation, additional staffing, etc. necessary to begin the project.

Off the Board

These opportunities are actually on the board itself, and they’re referred to as Off the Board to indicate that they are the last opportunities you might pursue while you work through the other three areas of the board. Keep these opportunities in this fourth section of the board so you don’t forget them. They are your “someday or maybe” opportunities.

The Opportunity Board has many uses. It can be utilized as a personal planning tool to organize your own opportunities into the various sections of the Board. It can also be utilized by a leadership team to check for alignment. If each member of a leadership team completes a Board and then presents it to the group, individuals on the team might begin to see why others are not addressing certain issues on as timely a basis as they’d like.

The above team exercise can reveal misalignment around the table with regard to priorities, giving the team the opportunity to create a collective agenda and reorient members of the team around that common set of priorities. Some organizations have even used The Opportunity Board to do annual strategic planning to help them sort through the most viable and important strategies they wish to implement.

How will you utilize The Opportunity Board to sort through and prioritize opportunities competing for your attention?

Dr. David Chinsky is the Founder of the Institute for Leadership Fitness, a celebrated speaker, and author of The Fit Leader’s Companion: A Down-to-Earth Guide for Sustainable Leadership Success. After spending nearly twenty years in executive leadership positions at the Ford Motor Company, Nestle and Thomson Reuters, he now focuses on preparing leaders to achieve their highest level of professional effectiveness and leadership fitness. For more information on Dr. David Chinsky, please visit: www.FitLeadersAcademy.com.

Kate Zabriskie

Avoiding Days of the Living Dead

Addressing Workplace Zombies and Promoting Engagement One Person at a Time

By Kate Zabriskie

Kate Zabriskie-zombi sotry

Zombies in the workplace are soul-sucking, money-draining, productivity-killing entities that chip away at an organization’s spirit and its engagement levels one convert at a time.

These creatures often look like the rest of us, but deep down they’re cancerous beasts that can potentially drive a business to ruin.

So what’s a manager to do? Recognize the problem, know its source, understand why action is essential, and then do the work required to create a zombie-free workplace.

Knowing Your Zombies

Although zombies come in many varieties, most resemble one or more of the following:

Zombies in the workplace look like the rest of us, but deep down they’re cancerous beasts that can potentially drive a business to ruin. Click To Tweet
  1. Negative zombies—Often the easiest to spot, they complain, moan, and express their dissatisfaction regularly. Some will use humor to disguise their disgust, but they are nevertheless contagious and a threat to the uninfected.
  2. Minimum-contributor zombies—They do the basics but nothing more. You will never see them looking for work or volunteering for projects. Furthermore, many act as if they are doing you a favor when you ask them to perform a task they get paid for doing.
  3. Status-quo zombies—These change-averse creatures dig in their heels and fight the future. They are happy with everything the way it is and take no initiative to implement new ideas. The most dangerous of this variety will even resort to sabotage if they feel threatened.
  4. Shortcut zombies—They find ways to cut corners and circumvent processes. Their choices frequently expose the organization to unneeded risk. Worse still, when these zombies are in charge of training others, they pass on bad habits and poor practices.

Identifying the Source

To rid an organization of zombies, you must understand how you got them. Each zombie has a creation story. These are the most common:

  1. The ready-made zombie story: People who were really zombies when someone interviewed them, and they got the job anyway.
  2. The we-did-it-here zombie story: Unlike the ready-made zombies, these zombies were created after they joined the organization. They were discouraged, taught to fear, or worse.
  3. The retired-on-the-job zombie story: These zombies should be long retired, but because of a need to complete a certain number of years of employment before receiving some financial reward or other benefit, they’re still in the workplace and just going through the motions.
  4. The abandoned zombie: Abandoned zombies are employees who could perform well if they didn’t feel as if they were the only ones who cared. After struggling alone, these poor creatures eventually succumbed and now just try to survive.

Making the Choice Before It’s Too Late

When left unchecked, zombies can take over a department, division, or even an entire organization with relative ease. For that reason, it is essential that organizations are focused and vigilant in their approach to zombie management.

Organizations that fail to take the problem seriously may find that it’s too late. To escape havoc when zombies gain a foothold, good employees will often leave for safer territory.

Then, by the time management recognizes its predicament, a lot of talent has walked out the door, and what remains is not sufficient to do great work.

Taking Action

Implementing an anti-zombie initiative is no easy task, but it can be done and done well if you take the process seriously and stay dedicated to invigorating your workforce.

Step One:Be candid about your numbers. High turnover is a strong sign that there is a zombie problem. High absenteeism, poor output, and substandard financial performance are other clues. Think about what you would see if your organization were-zombie free and what numbers would be associated with that vision. Next, compare those statistics to the current reality and set some performance goals.

Step Two:Once you understand your global numbers, you should measure employee engagement. You can run a formal survey with a company that specializes in engagement or create one on your own. As with step one, the goal here is to get a sense of what’s working, what isn’t, and the breadth of your zombie problem.

Step Three: Next, ask yourself what are you seeing and hearing that you don’t want to see, and what are you not seeing and hearing that you do? After you know where the gaps are, think about solutions to address those shortcomings. If your zombies belong to the status-quo category, for example, consider putting in a process whereby everyone is tasked with finding two ways to improve his or her work processes or outputs.

No matter what you choose, be sure you have the stamina to stick with the zombie-eradication tactics you implement. Fewer activities done well will beat a lot of mediocre ones every time.

Step Four: Be prepared to let go of those you can’t save. Despite best efforts, some zombies simply can’t be cured. If you’ve done all you can, and they’re still the walking dead or worse, it’s time to say goodbye. If the termination process in your organization is cumbersome and lengthy, at a minimum, you must protect the uninfected and recently cured from the zombie holdouts.

Step Five:Recognize success and coach for deficiencies. Saving zombies happens one employee at a time. People, who are clear about expectations, receive proper training, get coaching when they miss the mark, and feel appreciated when they get it right or go above and beyond, are highly unlikely to enter or venture back into zombie territory.

Ask

  • Do managers “walk the talk” and model anti-zombie behavior?
  • Do employees understand how their work is connected to the organization’s goals? Can they explain that connection in a sentence or less?
  • Are employees held accountable for following established processes and procedures?
  • Do managers confront negativity?
  • Do managers encourage and reward initiative?
  • Do they meet one-on-one with their direct reports on a regular basis?
  • Does a strong zombie-screening interview process exist?
  • When good people leave, does someone conduct an exit interview to see if zombies are the reason for the departure?

The answers to those questions should serve as a starting point for encouraging engagement and avoiding everything from a small zombie outbreak to a full-blown apocalypse. You can never be too prepared.

Kate Zabriskie is the president of Business Training Works, Inc., a Maryland-based talent development firm. She and her team help businesses establish customer service strategies and train their people to live up to what’s promised. For more information, visit www.businesstrainingworks.com

Tra Williams

Four Reasons Every Professional Should Have a Strategic Plan for Personal Development

By Tra Williams

If you are serious about growing your business, everyone on your team needs a strategic plan for their own development that is separate from and exceeds the company’s current needs. Here’s why

Every year millions of business leaders spend days if not weeks collaborating with their peers to develop a strategic plan for their company to execute. Goals are set, tactics are outlined, and information is cascaded to all levels of the organization. If done properly, each department and each person understands their role in the plan and throughout the twelve months that follow everyone strives to do their part.

However, in doing so, they hitch their personal development to the company wagon.

Individuals are more marketable when their skillset advances with its own momentum. Click To Tweet

Without a separate strategic plan for themselves as individuals, they unwittingly limit their development to the skills required to achieve the goals of their employer.  Most don’t think about or realize the limitation because their employer usually acknowledges and rewards them for their efforts. Therefore, their development feels like an accomplishment not a limitation. But here are four reasons why the company-prescribed linear path isn’t enough for the individual or the company.

1. White Space

Great companies build growth strategies around the opportunities that their existing infrastructure affords them.  If every team member develops only in ways and at the pace that their employer’s goals require, then the organization’s growth is limited to the plans that are laid each year. However, if team members are developing with their own momentum, previously unplanned opportunities can be immediately seized. There are no crystal balls, so growth-focused organizations need untapped talent on their bench if they want the corporate agility that unplanned opportunities require.

2. Stronger Partnerships

When potential business partnerships or joint ventures are being contemplated the due diligence should and usually does include an asset assessment—and people are every company’s most valuable asset.  The very nature of new partnerships means growth and change.  Both sides of the equation want to know that the other side has the existing talent that the venture requires.  Imagine how quickly a new business relationship would crumble if the strategy was initiated concurrently with the personnel development required to execute it.

3. Marketability

Individuals are more marketable when their skillset advances with its own momentum. Fortunately, they also add marketability to the company itself. Most business owners have a planned exit strategy that usually involves a merger, an acquisition, or possibly going public; and all three require an investment from outside the company. Investors always expect growth in addition to a return on their investment. Potential shareholders may not examine employee development prior to buying Apple or Amazon stock, but venture capitalists look for companies that have growth opportunities and a talent pool to turn those opportunities into profits. Untapped talent means additional revenue opportunities, and that’s like ringing the dinner bell for hungry investors.

4. Succession

Succession planning is always a fickle challenge. As businesses mature so does their leadership. More often than not, members of the existing executive leadership team are all very close in age. When they begin to hit the retirement horizon a difficult problem arises; promote from within or hire from without.  Hiring externally is always a gamble and studies have shown that it is more cost-effective to develop your own leaders.  A study by the Wharton School of Business showed that hiring externally costs 18-20 percent more than promoting from within and performs worse—at least in the first two years. A Harvard study showed that replacing a CEO with an externally candidate results in an average performance drop of 6 percent. New faces come with unknown consequences and culture is binary; someone may look good on paper but a C-Level exec who is culturally inconsistent with the company can have catastrophic consequences, especially in smaller organizations.

If you are serious about growing your business, every person on your team needs a strategic plan for their own development that is separate from and exceeds the company’s current needs. It is important that each person develop their own plan; it should not be made up of additional expectations prescribed by the company.  However, the company should set parameters for what is included in each person’s plan. For instance, every person’s plan should include hard and soft skills. At least one of their personal development goals should be a hard skill that it is unrelated to their current duties. The plan should also include short and long term development goals. With enough practice, it may only take a few months to become a better public speaker, but it may take years to speak in another language. And finally, every person’s plan should include at least one goal that builds upon his or her previous plan. While not too prescriptive, parameters like these assure development breadth and depth.

We spend a lot of time developing plans for our businesses. And to be fair, most of us work hard to facilitate people development as well. There is a difference, however, between working hard to facilitate something and having a tangible strategic plan that includes tactics and measurable outcomes. The former shows that you care about your people. The latter shows that you recognize personal development is the lynchpin for success.

Tra Williams is a celebrated speaker, business consultant and author of the forthcoming book Feed Your Unicorn. He is a nationally recognized thought leader in small business, franchising, leadership and entrepreneurship. Tra works tirelessly with people, professionals, and organizations to help them define success on their own terms and build the framework required to sustain it. For more information, please visit: www.TraWilliams.com.

John Waid

The 3 Values of Great Leaders

Are You a V.I.P. Leader?

By John Waid

John Waid-the best leaders

Leadership is an overused word. There are a lot of managers in companies, but very few leaders. Even the ones that call themselves leaders possess attributes that leave much to be desired. Great leaders have a few qualities that make them special and make the companies they lead extraordinary for people and profits.

So what is the definition of leadership? Great leaders are not the people that you’re forced to follow; they are the ones that you want to follow. Great leaders are humble, care more about others than themselves and know that it’s not about the leader, it’s about the followers. Most of the best leaders have a dream and turn that dream into reality with others.

So what’s in the DNA of great leaders and what values do they stand for? What makes them V.I.P.’s?

Best leaders know that if they do not put their people before profits they will make fewer profits; and so they are loved by their people, not feared. Click To Tweet

Values: Value Lies in The Values

The great leaders know that they are responsible for establishing the culture of the company. As a matter of fact, the great leaders know that culture is their number one responsibility and work on it daily.

Let’s say that you take over a company that has been in business for 100 years, is currently about to go bankrupt, and has almost 100,000 people? What do you do first?

Most people would analyze the strategy and probably change it. What happens if the 100,000 people do not believe in the new strategy? Will you be successful?

Others would change the strategy and when that didn’t work, they would focus on restructuring. Maybe a Chapter 11 will be their saving grace. But if that doesn’t work? Then, of course it was not the leader’s fault; it was because the people did not execute the strategy and then did not work well in the new structure.

The best leaders would analyze what the company was doing well when it was successful and see how they could replicate it. Most companies had a founder and beliefs that people followed that made the company successful. The best leaders work on the values and behaviors of the people and make sure they worked on the culture first. Because without the people knowing and living the values that you stand for you may be doomed on getting people to follow you.

So the best leaders work on culture first and have unique values that they all know and they train on; and it is at the core of how they hire, fire, and promote.

So what are some things you can do today that would make you a better leader?

  1.  Select or pare down your values to one to three values (no more than that) that are unique to what makes you successful.
  2. Define how these values should be lived down to details like “Our people smile with teeth.”
  3. Hire, fire and promote for these behaviors and make sure to hire people who already believe in them as they are more likely to do what you are going to ask them to do anyway. Emphasize and train the specific behaviors in detail. Success or failure in companies is all about people and how they behave.

Leaders should work on Why—Culture First through values and daily behaviors, How—Structure second through coaches and paying attention to how to serve the customers, and What—Strategy third through managers. Identify your sustainable competitive advantages and when they will be executed to produce results and profits. The best leaders are also master communicators.

Inspiration: Inspire on Purpose

Great leaders make sure that everyone knows, is inspired by, and lives the purpose of why they are there. Many of the great leaders talk about the purpose of the company often and make sure that everyone cares about why they are there in the first place.

People in companies don’t get frustrated necessarily by what they do, they get burned-out because they don’t know why they do it or don’t like who they are doing it for. Purpose-driven companies continually outperform companies that lack purpose.

Do you have a purpose, other than making money for why your company exists? Define this transcendent or noble purpose by:

  1.  Talk about why you are in business. What is the ultimate outcome if you do great work? Who will it benefit?
  2. Decide what your purpose will be—some made up examples are “We Believe in Better Living”, “We Help People Be Better”, “We Inspire, Inspiration”
  3. Communicate a inspire people to live the purpose daily.

Leaders can inspire on purpose if they have a purpose. Make sure that you develop a purpose that others are willing to follow voluntarily.

People: Be in the People Business

The best leaders realize that if you do not put people before profits you will make fewer profits. The leaders that connect with the frontline and have the support of the people that make the money are the ones that people are willing to follow voluntarily.

There are leaders that care about the money, others about the customers, and still others that care about people (starting with the employees). The best leaders care deeply about their employees and put them first, knowing that if the employees live the purpose and values (culture) then they will be great to customers and produce more profits.

The best leaders are loved by their people, not feared. They care about each one of them even more than they care about themselves. They know that they are the examples for how they want others to behave. The best ones eat in the employee cafeteria, spend time with the front line, and value them. These leaders are especially adept at communicating with actions before words.

Some ways to focus on people first are:

  1. No matter what industry you are in, you should become an expert in people; because if you think about it, you are in the people business. First, you need to understand your people and need to serve them so they can serve the customer. Most companies are strong in technical skills and weak in people skills.
  2. Train on people skills and benchmark internally and externally against the best in the business.
  3. Make your headquarters “the people headquarters” and make sure you focus on hiring for purpose and values. Make sure your leaders are humble and believe they are and know how to be in the people business.

Want to be the best leader? Become a V.I.P. leader who focuses on Values, Inspiration, and Purpose and you too will be a V.I.P for your employees, customers and the bottom line.

John Waid is the founder of C-3 Corporate Culture Consulting, a keynote speaker and author of the forthcoming book, Inspiring Isabella—A Little Story for Leaders About Culture-Driven Leaders. With a specialty and passion for corporate culture, sales and global business, John believes culture is the engine that drives companies to better results, higher morale, and increased profitability. An active speaker, trainer and subject matter expert, John Waid holds an enduring belief that corporate culture is the key to success for companies. For more information on John Waid, please visit: www.CorporateCultureConsulting.com.

Peter DeHaan

The Power of a Compliment

Telling others that you appreciate them can make a huge difference

By Peter Lyle DeHaan , PhD

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan-the power of compliment

In the years between high school graduation and my first real job, I took on a variety of part-time work while being a full-time student. During one such vocational transition, the placement advisor at school knew of an immediate opening for an audio engineer at a TV station. I arrived to find out it would be a group interview, not a group of people interviewing me, but rather one person simultaneously interviewing three candidates.

Stan was an odd-looking guy, with clothes and a hairstyle emanating from the previous decade. Despite the powerful magnification of his Coke-bottle glasses, he still squinted at everything. Stan led us candidates to an open room and the interview quickly fell into an awkward pattern. Stan would ask a question and we would respond in order, with me going last. With my classmates embellishing many of their answers, I struggled to honestly present myself as the desirable candidate.

Telling others that you appreciate them can make a huge difference. Click To Tweet

After a while, the classmate who went first blurted out, “I have a Third Class FCC License.” “This position doesn’t require an FCC License,” Stan responded. “I have a Second Class FCC License,” the second one boasted.

Then all eyes turned to me. Should I let them know that my credential was even better, although equally irrelevant? Or would my silence communicate another deficiency in this game I was losing? Opting to avoid further silence, I informed the group that I had a First Class FCC License.

Of course, this meant nothing as far as the job was concerned. Everyone was uncomfortable with this exchange but as the last one to speak, I felt it more acutely. Seeking to defuse the tension, I changed the subject. “When do you want us to start?”

“As soon as possible,” Stan replied.

“I can start in two weeks,” volunteered contestant number one.

“I can start in three days,” bested contestant number two.

“I can start tomorrow,” I asserted confidently.

“Okay,” Stan replied, “be at the station at 6:30 tomorrow morning.” I was hired!

The first day I watched Stan work and did a lot of listening. As he explained it, the job seemed simple. There was lots of idle time, four live broadcasts and on some days production work in between. However, he was more interested in regaling his glory days as a radio DJ than in training me. It turned out that Stan was also a silent partner in an out-of-town enterprise; his presence was urgently required to protect his investment. As soon as my two weeks of training were completed, Stan would be gone.

On my second day, Stan let me touch the control panel, and I did the first live segment. It was a 30-second weather report. I turned on the mike when the weatherman was cued and turned it off when he was done. There was a mike check beforehand and I monitored the level as he spoke. I did the second live broadcast, too, a one-minute news segment. Stan did the third segment: news and weather – two mikes!

The half hour noon show, however, was overwhelming. There were a half a dozen mikes to activate, monitor, and kill, recordings for musical bridges, an array of possible audio sources, and a live announcer, plus an abrupt change in plans if a segment ran long or there was time to fill.

On the third day, Stan called in to tell me he would be late. He reviewed expectations of the first two segments, and I did them solo. He called later, before the third, and we talked it through; he promised to be in before the noon show. I did the third segment by myself.

Stan called to say he had been watching, and I had done fine. Could I do the noon show by myself? “No!” I asserted. “Okay, he assured, “I will come in, but let’s talk through it just in case.” I never saw Stan again; my “training” was over.

With sweaty palms and a knotted gut, I muddled my way through the noon show, knowing that thousands would hear any miscue. By the time the show ended, I was physically exhausted; my head ached.

This pattern repeated itself before each noon show for the next several months. If only I had received more training to boost my confidence.

On-the-job training was fine for production work. Time was not an issue and retakes were common, expected, and accepted. If I lacked training in some area, the director instructed me.

The live shows were a different story. It was tense and nerve-racking; they expected perfection and didn’t tolerate errors. This produced an incredible amount of pressure and anxiety.

This stress was partly due to my lack of training, but more importantly a result of the directors; I worked with three. My favorite was nice and kind; he remembered what it was like to do my job and was empathic. Unfortunately, I seldom worked with him.

The second director was aloof and focused only on the broadcast, not caring what he said or how he treated others. Fortunately, I didn’t work with him too much.

Most of my interaction was with a third director. During live broadcasts, he became verbally volatile and abusive. He yelled – a lot. When he was mad, he yelled louder – all laced with expletives. Management via intimidation was his style. My goal was to get through the noon show without a verbal tongue-lashing; usually I was unsuccessful. Of course, this made me even tenser.

Although most of the work was fine, my angst from this half hour each day caused me to despise my job. Thankfully, my remaining time was short, as graduation neared. I grabbed the first job offer and gave my two-week notice.

Ironically, the day after I submitted my resignation, the volatile director asked, “You should be getting some vacation, soon, shouldn’t you?”

“I haven’t put in enough time, yet,” I replied. “Besides, I just gave my two-weeks’ notice.”

“What!” He slammed some papers on the table with a curse. “I can’t believe it.” His face turned red. “We finally get someone good, and they don’t pay him enough to stay.”

I was dumbfounded. “Good?” I questioned. “I’m not good.”

“You’re the best audio engineer we’ve had in years.”

“What about Stan?” I asked.

“Stan was an idiot. He was always making mistakes. We couldn’t get through a broadcast without him screwing it up. You did better your first week than he ever did.”

“But, I make mistakes every day.”

“Your mistakes are trivial,” he disclosed. “Few viewers ever notice.” As he picked up his papers and left the room, I contemplated what he had said. I am good!

Not surprisingly, I had a new attitude during the noon show that day. My nervousness dissipated, I made no “mistakes,” no one yelled at me, and most significantly, I enjoyed it. My job was fun.

On my second to the last day there, I met the weekend audio engineer. She was thinking about taking over my shift. She wanted to see what was involved in the noon show. Unfortunately, that day the show was one of the most difficult I had encountered. There was a live band, with each person and instrument separately miked, plus there were a few unusual twists. I would need every piece of gear in the room and use the entire audio console. Although it was stressful, it was a good stress, because I was a good audio engineer. I performed my part without error, earning a rare compliment from my critical director. At the end of the show, I leaned back with the knowledge of a job well done.

My protégé shook her head. “I could never do that,” she sighed and left the room.

My last two weeks at the TV station were most enjoyable. As such, it is with fondness that I recall my time there. How might things have been even better if someone had told me sooner that I was doing a good job?

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is a published author and commercial freelance writer who provides content marketing services.